Not resolutions

As soon as we returned from our New Year’s Eve dinner, Holly hurried upstairs and pulled out her journal. “What are you writing about?” I asked her. “I’m writing my New Year’s resolutions,” she said.

Earlier this week, a friend mentioned in an email that she was thinking about making a New Year’s resolution and wondered if I was making any.

I used to make New Year’s resolutions, and then in more recent years I started thinking more in terms of New Year’s goals: not things I was certain (rightly or wrongly) that I would do, but things I was firmly committed to trying to do.

But this year, as soon as my friend asked in her email whether I was making any New Year’s resolutions, I realized how different I was feeling this time around about starting a new year, and how somehow both resolutions and goals seemed somewhat irrelevant.

It’s not that I don’t have plenty of room for self-improvement. It’s just that when I look back on the preceding year and especially the latter half of it, it seems like so much of what governed the course of my life was nothing I did or didn’t do but things that happened to me, or around me, or to all of us. Events beyond my control over which neither resolutions nor goals would have held much sway.

After all, you can’t make a New Year’s resolution not to lose any friends to cancer. You can’t resolve that in the new year, you won’t have to explain to your kids that children sometimes lose their parents, or that parents sometimes lose their children. You can’t resolve away poverty or despair among people who have even less control over their circumstances than you do. You can’t make a New Year’s resolution not to live in a society where people crusade for the accessibility of submachine guns.

I don’t mean to sound despairing. It’s not that we had such a bad year ourselves, not at all. My family, both immediate and extended, stayed safe and healthy and well. We took some great vacations, accomplished some satisfying work, and saw the kids be both happier and more academically successful in school than we ever would have dared hope.

But I’m afraid for the most part this is just the reality of middle age catching up with us. Statistically, we are destined to lose more friends in the upcoming years than we did in the preceding ones. And the world doesn’t appear to getting safer or saner or fairer, either nationally or globally.

If we are as fortunate as we’ve been in the past year, 2013 won’t bring tragedies or losses too close to home. But that’s not a resolution; it’s a fervent hope. Things will happen, both good and bad. And while I don’t mean for my lack of resolutions to sound like, well, a lack of resolution, or a sense of passivity, I think better than making resolutions or setting goals for the upcoming year will be thinking about my reactions and responses.

I can’t resolve to keep these things from happening; I can just hope to keep improving in the way I respond to them: to be ever more helpful, compassionate, understanding, proactive.

It’s not really what I’d call a resolution. But right now, it feels like the most useful thing I can do.

 

 

 

Waking early

This summer I find myself waking easily around 6 a.m., 6:30 at the latest, and I marvel as I begin the day how easy it has become to arise early.

This is a fairly remarkable thing to me. For years, I’ve tried to become more of an early-morning person. On January 1st of 2010, it was my singular resolution: I was going to try to be out of bed earlier in the morning. And by earlier, at that point, I meant before eight o’clock on weekends.

But it’s never been something that comes naturally to me. I get up early on school days or work days because I have to, but given the leeway of weekends or vacations, I used to always drowse until well after dawn, even in the winter when “after dawn” meant well past seven o’clock.

This summer that’s changed, though. It may be a sign of aging; I’ve always heard that it’s easier for older people to wake up early. It may be a sign that my children are more self-reliant; at the ages of 10 and 13, they simply don’t wear me out on a daily basis the way they once did.

Or it could be a combination of these factors. Because the fact is that it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve started waking earlier just as the kids are reaching the teen or pre-teen years at which young people typically start sleeping later. (Actually, Tim sleeps ‘til after nine; Holly wakes and then likes to read in bed in the morning. She has no idea what a wonderful luxury of childhood that is.)

So I feel richly rewarded as well as a little self-congratulatory this summer. Even with no firm morning commitments – that is, nothing more time-sensitive than trying to get a few hours of writing done before lunch so that the kids and I can do something fun in the afternoon – I’m still up before 6:30. The summer air is fresh and cool in the early morning. Even the dog is still asleep; I write my Morning Pages, put on my running shoes, and then wake her when I’m ready to head out the door for a run.

And then when I’m done with my workout 45 minutes later, the kids are still asleep, and Rick is heading off to work. I can make breakfast and drink my coffee and read the paper and even check my email and start my work day before anyone else is awake, before anyone needs anything from me.

It’s funny to me to think how long I tried to force this change, and how then it just happened on its own. I don’t necessarily think there’s a uniform lesson to be learned from that. For example, I don’t really believe that if I just stop attempting weight loss, I’ll lose five pounds, or that if I stop trying to improve my writing, I’ll find an acceptance letter from the New Yorker in the mailbox.

Still, there may be a small lesson in it. I keep thinking of that Buddhist phrase: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Only in this case, it’s “when the subject is ready, the habit will take hold.” Maybe I really needed all that extra sleep, all those years. Maybe now there’s something different about me that is more interested in the quiet of the early morning than the chance to rest. I can’t take much credit, but I’m finally an earlier riser. And just as I imagined, it feels wonderful.

Eating well, cooking well

For me, New Year’s Day has nothing on Labor Day when it comes to making resolutions. I imagine I’m not unusual in this regard, at least among parents of school-aged children. Never mind new resolve with which to correct habits in early January; for us, September is the fresh start in which I try every year to do everything right.

This fall, one of my resolutions was around menu planning. I like to cook, but I’m not always the most efficient meal planner. Despite the abundance of interesting recipes easily located in cookbooks I own and more cookbooks at the library; recipes sent by friends or by my sisters; recipes via the Internet; and recipes in magazines that arrive monthly in the mail, I’m all too quick to fall back on those dishes that require no recipes at all, because they’re so simple or because I’ve made them so many times. They please the palates of my family, but they also tend to get a little dull.

And there’s just so much good food out there waiting to be prepared. Interesting ingredients. Original techniques. Newly evolving cuisines. For someone who really does enjoy the culinary arts, like me, it just doesn’t make sense to fall back on baked drumsticks and pasta with red sauce and meat loaf quite so often.

My sister Sarah is the opposite. She is not only a good cook but what I would call a proactive cook, one who is always trying new recipes and new methods. In fact, she once told me that when she asked her husband if he liked a particular dish she had made, he said pleasantly enough, “What difference does it make? I’m never going to see it again.”

I aspire to be more like that. Over the summer I became lazier about cooking than ever. Tim and Rick were playing baseball during the dinner hour four nights a week, and it was just so much easier to grill or sauté some standard piece of protein and throw a salad together than get out a recipe and measuring spoons and ingredients.

But now with school back in session, I’m resolved to try harder. When the fall issue of Eating Well arrived in the mail in late August, I gave the kids a packet of stickie-note flags and asked them to go through the magazine and mark every recipe they’d like to try. In the weeks that followed, I tried to make each recipe they had flagged, and each one was a success. A friend gave me a recipe she thought we’d like, and I made it the very next day. When I came across an interesting recipe in the newspaper, instead of just telling myself I’d try it someday, I printed it out right away and put it in my cookbook holder.

The kids have actually noticed and remarked upon this new approach. They’re impressed that as I make out the grocery list, I can tell them what I plan to make for dinner each day in the upcoming week. (So far this week it’s been spinach strata on Monday, sausage risotto on Tuesday, chicken pot pie Wednesday, and corn fritters with roasted squash on Thursday. Friday, of course, is the Sabbath. Not in the Jewish Orthodox sense but in the sense that I plan to wait around for someone else to make dinner. No matter how long I have to wait.)

Resolutions have a way of falling by the wayside. For New Year’s resolutions, late January is typical; for New School Year resolutions, probably soon after Columbus Day weekend. But with luck, that will be just when a new issue of Eating Well arrives in the mail, and it will be enough to keep us flagging recipes – and using them – for at least another month.

Determined to learn something new

I decided over the weekend that I am going to commit to trying to learn something new this summer. I’m going to try to learn to drive a powerboat.

Proclaiming this in the most sanguine of tones right now could be seen as a bit disingenuous. It will be a while before I have to prove my seriousness of intent. The specific boat I plan to learn to drive isn’t even in the water yet, and I’m more than a hundred miles from the particular coastline at which I hope to get my start. Sitting in my home office on a farm in the outer suburbs of Boston, with a view that overlooks woods and pastures as well as grazing cows and sheep, I might as well be 2500 miles from the ocean as the 25 I actually am. Easy to sit here at my desk on a warm May morning, coffee cup in hand, and announce that I plan to learn to drive a boat.

Nonetheless, my intent is genuine, and one reason I’m writing about it is that I believe so strongly in the “Write it down, make it happen” method of self-determination espoused by Henriette Anne Klauser, which says that the mere act of committing a resolution to paper (or screen) increases the odds of success. At least a few dozen people read my blog every day; if I openly share my intention, surely that’s a small step toward making it a reality.

I grew up in a boating family and married into another one; I now have an 11-year-old son who loves boats. And yet I always took it for granted that operating a boat was simply not something I was cut out for. I have boat phobia the same way some girls and women have math phobia: though no one but me is to blame for any message I’ve internalized about boating, I’ve always believed I just wouldn’t be capable of it. Boating was, I thought, something that required skills and talents that I was indisputably missing.

Well, I guess we’ll find out, and I can only hope this blog entry won’t be read at my memorial service after I go to a watery grave. (If that sounds like a morbid thought, I firmly believe bloggers and diarists have to think this way. I write in my journal every single day; something I write could be the last thing I ever write, and I have to be comfortable with the idea that anything I choose to publish could be what I’m ultimately remembered by.) My reasons are simple. I have the opportunity this summer to make good use of a new vacation property in the family at which is a boat, and if I don’t learn to operate it, we’ll be able to use it only when one of the two current boaters in the family is present, my father or my husband. However, my plans for this summer and farther into the future definitely involve time at the vacation place when neither of them is likely to be there. My kids love going out in the boat, and I’d like to be able to offer the option to my friends and other guests as well. So it’s simple: I can either continue thinking, as I have ever since adolescence, that I’m someone who is just not capable of operating a boat – as I’m not someone capable of learning trigonometry – or I can try to learn.

When I was in high school, I had a science teacher who told us on the first day of class that every year she tries to take up a new hobby – piano playing, American Sign Language, improv comedy, chess – just so that as a teacher, she never forgets what it’s like to be learning, to be a beginner trying to master a whole new concept. In my adult life, I haven’t been very good about seeking out new skills. I’ve let myself get into a lot of ruts in terms of believing I know what I’m good at and what I’m not.

Well, it’s one thing to know yourself and recognize your weaknesses, but I’m not convinced. I believe I’m a fairly good automobile driver, though I wasn’t when I started out, and I want to see if I can transfer those skills to the marine world. The benefits of my being able to use the boat will be many, but probably the greatest benefit if I succeed at this resolution will simply be the sense of empowerment it gives me. Maybe I’m someone who can learn new skills. Maybe I’m someone who can develop abilities that she previously assumed she didn’t have. And if that’s the case, maybe operating a boat is just the first step of many.